Bill Bryson's African Diary - Bill Bryson [11]
“I’m naming my first child Nino,” Dan said quietly.
Nick was staring at his hand and a large piece of fuselage that he seemed to have pulled off in the course of the landing.
Nino took off his headset and turned around beaming. “Sorry about that, chaps,” he said. “Had a little trouble spotting the runway.”
“W-w-why is there no windscreen wiper?” I asked with difficulty.
“They’re no use with a single engine,” he said, pointing to the propeller directly in front. “Best wiper in the world couldn’t keep up with the spray off that thing.”
Somehow this didn’t seem an entirely satisfactory explanation, but I was happy to leave it at that. Besides, I had a sudden overwhelming urge to drink my body weight in alcohol.
And I can tell you this for certain now: however many years are left to me and wherever fate takes me, the only way I will ever be killed by a light aircraft is if one falls on me.
Thursday, October 3
And So to western Kenya. We set off bright and early to drive to Kisumu, Kenya’s third city, on the shores of Lake Victoria. Kisumu is only about 300 kilometers west of Nairobi, but the roads are potholed and slow for much of the way, so we had to allow five hours to get there. I didn’t care. None of us did. We were four feet off the ground and wouldn’t get any higher all day.
The countryside was gorgeous—green and grassy with long views to the rugged Mau Escarpment in one direction and to the green hills of Aberdares National Park and central highlands in the other, all beneath vast blue skies and baking sun. Here and there along the heights overlooking the Rift Valley there were roomy laybys where you could pull off to take in the views, each with 15 or 20 forlorn trinket and souvenir stalls waiting for customers who these days mostly never come. There was wildlife, too—families of baboons dining on road kill along the shoulder, herds of impalas and zebras dotting the grasslands, soda lakes carpeted with thousands of bright pink flamingoes. There was no question that we were in Africa now.
Kisumu has the distinction of being the poorest city in Kenya. Almost half the people live on 50 cents a day or less. Curiously, it looked more prosperous than many of the other places we had been. It had a trim, modern central business district and quite a lot of nice housing. There seemed to be more bicycles along the roads and fewer street urchins.
We had come to see the work of Wedco, a small bank— micro-finance institution is the formal term—that has been one of CARE’s great success stories in the region. Wedco began in 1989 with the idea of making small loans to groups of ladies, generally market traders, who previously had almost no access to business credit. The idea was that half a dozen or so female traders would form a business club and take out a small loan, which they would apportion among themselves, to help them expand or improve their businesses. The idea of having a club was to spread the risk. It seemed a slightly loopy idea to many to focus exclusively on females, but it has been a runaway success.
“Our ladies are very shrewd and very hard working,” laughed Peres Oyugi, Kisumu’s branch manager, as we drove to Kisumu’s Jubilee Market to see some of Wedco’s money in action. Ten years ago, she told me,Wedco had loans on its books of 18 million Kenyan shillings—about $250,000. Today its loan portfolio has increased nearly tenfold to over 175 million shillings and it is helping more than 200 groups in Kisumu alone. There are seven other branches spread across the region.
Jubilee Market is an extraordinary place—crowded, noisy, extremely colorful—with large, open-sided halls specializing in wet fish, dried fish, vegetables, nuts and other farm commodities. I had never seen such luscious produce more beautifully arrayed. Every stall was a picture of abundance